Word of the Year 2006

Some of these are dated already, but one may yet be the 2006 Word of the Year.

"Quaqmire"--sorry, that landed second place back in 2003. Was it clear even then?

The people who publish the big red dictionary that's on many an office desk are conducting a survey to determine the Word of the Year, and the very existence of the contest tells us something about this year and where we're headed as a society. In previous years, Merriam-Webster relied on its scholars to determine the word that told us the most about what we'd just been through. This year, in keeping with the faux-democratization of everything from the news to museum curating to pop music, the dictionary company is making its choice by popular vote.

The folks at the New Oxford American English Dictionary beat the competition with an early decision--no polling necessary, they let their experts make the choice--naming "carbon neutral" as the 2006 winner. The term refers to the effort by some folks to calculate their contribution to the carbon emissions that warm the globe, and then find ways to eliminate some of those emissions.

The Oxford folks tend toward rather more obscure words and terms than Webster generally honors. Where Webster's runners-up last year included "refugee," "contempt," "filibuster," and "insipid," the Oxford list for this year includes head-scratchers such as "ghostriding," the practice of leaving your car and dancing next to or on top of it while it's still moving, and "elbow bump," a World Health Organization-endorsed method of greeting another human being by touching elbows rather than shaking hands, the better to avoid nasty germs.

Me, I'll take the nasty germs and leave the elbow bumps to the decider, the insurgents and the Islamofascists.

My Word of the Year? Since a phrase and not just a single word seems to be good enough for the folks at Oxford, I will go with "person of interest," the increasingly used weasel word that law enforcement types trot out to smear someone against whom they don't actually have decent evidence. Now there's a word that wouldn't even exist if it weren't for the craven desire of all too many of us to get our 15 minutes on TV, or at least on a coupla blogs.

The word of 2007 will be "handoff", as in we're not withdrawing troops from Iraq, we're doing a security handoff.

Posted by: Tomcat | December 1, 2006 12:38 PM

news worthy

Posted by: WB | December 1, 2006 12:43 PM

Macaca. Definitely macaca. The one word which tipped the balance of the congress into the hands of the Democrats.

Posted by: Anonymous | December 1, 2006 12:54 PM

popozao! a rockstar nomination... i second it.

Posted by: yo | December 1, 2006 1:20 PM

Celebutard

Posted by: techweenie | December 1, 2006 2:06 PM

Bush's world view of Iraq is "Disney-like".

"Net Net" people are dying every day in Iraq.

That idea is "right in the strike zone".

But the Republicans have "run that play one too many times".

Posted by: Some Guy | December 1, 2006 2:11 PM

Cordelia

Posted by: Cordelia's Dad | December 1, 2006 2:43 PM

"Trap game," from sports jargon.

Posted by: JimTX | December 1, 2006 2:56 PM

You mis-defined "person of interest". It's the increasingly used weasel word that news media types trot out to smear someone when the law enforcement types haven't actually arrested anyone.

Posted by: Anonymous | December 1, 2006 3:05 PM

polonium-210

Posted by: putin | December 1, 2006 3:19 PM

stay the course

Posted by: b | December 1, 2006 3:30 PM

truthiness

Posted by: b | December 1, 2006 3:36 PM

If not macaca, then RoveStorm (or variant Rovian)or value-added.

Posted by: Curmudgeon | December 1, 2006 4:20 PM

Nobody has yet suggested "waterboarding."

Posted by: Curmudgeon | December 1, 2006 4:24 PM

Reality check

Posted by: SS MD | December 1, 2006 5:07 PM

Many good suggestions here. Some of them (waterboarding, Christianist) are good words for bad phenomena.

Others: exit strategy, phased withdrawal, IED . . . I know there are others, but apparently they're not so central that they're on the tip of my tongue.

It's amazing how fast terminology that appears in the news finds its way into the culture and, equally rapidly, become tired and lose their effect. Who knew we'd be hearing "sectarian violence" so often? Even more common are "Sunni" and "Shi'ite," both widely used and, I suspect, much less widely understood. Unfortunately, those terms are not likely to become part of the background as rapidly as some.

Posted by: THS | December 1, 2006 5:42 PM

reinventing the wheel

Posted by: TBG | December 2, 2006 10:24 AM

global

Posted by: Anonymous | December 3, 2006 11:15 PM

global

Posted by: SRG | December 3, 2006 11:16 PM

Ted Haggard's speed-and-prostitute induced santorum was full of macaca.

Posted by: Get it? | December 4, 2006 10:42 AM

YouTube. Without it, you wouldn't know about macaca.

Posted by: dirrtysw | December 4, 2006 4:58 PM

Truthiness.

Posted by: CarpeNoctem | December 4, 2006 5:34 PM

As for expressions; please, do not use "...rearranging deck chairs on the titanic" or "...like herding cats" anymore.

Also, everyone should stop using the word 'paranoid' as anything other than the mental disorder that it is; i.e., a BELIEF that one or more people are surreptitiously taking action to harm you. I keep hearing people say things like "I'm paranoid that I won't make the party on time." No, you're not.